Gun violence remains a persistent problem in many communities. Each year, over 8,000 individuals are murdered with firearms in the U.S. The traditional police response to this social problem, increased deployment to suppress gunfire, is difficult to sustain in today's fiscal climate.
Therefore, many jurisdictions have focused their enforcement efforts on monitoring the subset of individuals at highest risk of involvement in fatal shootings based on research showing that the majority of both homicide victims and perpetrators are on probation, parole, or pretrial release. However, this approach can be labor intensive and existing monitoring technologies (e.g., radio frequency or global positioning system bracelets), can lead to information overload for officers in the absence of clear signals that the monitored individuals are at the location of a reported gun crime, which occurs in less than half of all outdoor gun discharges. While the scale of this problem suggests the need for a range of policy responses, an opportunity exists for advanced offender monitoring technology using low-cost wearable sensors to enhance public safety by detecting illegal firearm usage by individuals already under the supervision of the criminal justice system.
Certain prior work on gunshot detection has either focused on shooter localization using acoustic triangulation or localization of muzzle flashes using infrared cameras. In the domestic application, acoustic triangulation has been the most common implementation with distributed microphone networks constructed to provide location information for gunshot events in covered areas. An acoustic approach was disfavored in the current invention due to the difficulty of separating handgun-generated muzzle blasts from other impulsive acoustical events, even at close range, and the challenges of attributing a localized muzzle blast to the wearer of a sensor.